Pangs

Sunday

Paws

POSTDATED - 01/04/12

No sweet April Fools pranking action for me, I've got wolf paws to be making!

I started by stripping back the foam on the paws. I had been a little over-zealous on my armature slot-making so there were gaps all around anyway, and I figured making the whole paw from latex would make it easier to sculpt if the texture was uniform rather than some areas being foamy underneath. I added little plasticine plugs to the John Wright armatures to ensure the latex wouldn't gum up the Allen key tightening mechanism. Though they shouldn't need any adjustment because I tightened them up as much as should be needed.

Using the Ray Harryhausen build-up method I shaped the cotton wool soaked in black acrylic coloured latex to make the paw shape. After doing the initial wrapping of cotton wool strips around the armature I did a combination of shifting and poking with my custom built sculpting tool (the sharpened end of a plastic paintbrush) and snipping with my ever-faithful nail scissors to create the toes. This was quite fiddly work so I only managed to get one paw finished, though I expected the subsequent ones to go along quicker after initial one. It also gave me an opportunity to see if the latex would dry out overnight and whether they would need any jiggering after they had done so.